#wholesystemlearning - Change Leadership

“Old World” of classrooms and in the “New World” of Work.Moving between these two worlds, I have come to understand that there is a core set of survival skills for today’s workplace, as well as for lifelong learning and active citizenship—skills that are neither taught nor tested even in our best school systems.

— Tony Wagner

The demands of skills and dispositions for the 21st C workforce include collaboration, communication, critical analysis and creative problem-solving. These skills are even more crucial today than they have ever been.

It Ain't What It Used To Be

If the call is for change and for change to occur learning needs to happen, then teachers need to be enabled, encouraged and supported to learn.To learn there needs to be action. Actions that involve collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. Creativity to create innovation, and actions that flag the need to be doing something different.

If you always do what you have done, you will always get what you have always gotten

— Jessie Potter.

The call is for change, but that’s easier said than done…

Any change is difficult. In many cases, teachers and leaders experience a murkiness around the understanding - definition and therefore the ability to teach or build learning actions that grow collaboration, communication, critical analysis, creative problem-solving, and problem formulation.

We ourselves need to understand it first...

Without a deep understanding, schools will struggle to build relevant pedagogy that will be impactful and lead to deeper learning around these skills.

Often these skill teachers themselves struggle to unpack in a way the 21st C demands. The struggle is because today's teachers are the product of the old education system where they never experienced deep learning that included skills such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication.

The world simply no longer cares how much you know, because Google knows everything. Content knowledge has become a free commodity— like air or water — growing exponentially, changing constantly, and available on every Internet-connected device.

But before we do anything we need to gather together a collective WHY exactly we are changing...

So if you are striving for change, before you look to do anything you need to - as a collective, define WHY change. It needs to be defined in a way that encourages ownership rather than buy-in. In a way that problematizes rather than answers the question - WHY.Without that level of understanding the change process and the learning system fails to gain traction. The change becomes more like a V8 Super Car racing on slicks in the wet. It will slip and slide out of control and fail to gain any traction or acceleration at all. The status quo will prevail.

Over the next months, I will be exploring in more detail - Whole system learning, and The Leadership for Learning that is needed in a change leadership culture to enable change, ready tribes.

I begin to unpack the learning system in my latest White Paper - Whole system learning to enable change, ready tribes - you can access it here.

#WHOLE SYSTEM LEARNING

#THE CHEMISTRY OF LEARNING

#MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

Go Well...

ReferencesCouros, George (2015). The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity